Build a portfolio website with AI. The agent builds the shell around your work.

What you need before you build a portfolio website with AI

A portfolio run is only as good as the project material behind it, and that material lives with you. Before the brief goes in, gather a short folder per project: the final images at full resolution, who took each one and on what terms, the client's name and whether you may print it, the year, and a few honest sentences about the brief and what you did. Projects you cannot document yet can still be modelled; they simply stay drafts.

On the site itself you need WordPress, a builder with a template system, and a fields plugin. The content model is where the edition line falls. Creating the project post type, its taxonomies and the field group (acf-create-post-type, acf-create-taxonomy, acf-create-fieldgroup and their ACPT, Meta Box and Pods equivalents) is Pro. With Free alone you can still lay out pages in Elementor or blocks and tag ordinary posts with create-term and assign-terms, but the filterable, field-driven archive the brief describes needs the Pro fields modules.

A walkthrough: ACF and Bricks, one project at a time

Here is how the run usually unfolds on a studio site using ACF and Bricks. The model and templates are built once; after that, each project is a repeatable loop you can pause between entries.

• acf-check-setup confirms the ACF edition and version, because post types and taxonomies are only manageable through abilities on ACF 6.5 or newer; on older ACF it reports that rather than failing halfway.
• acf-create-post-type and acf-create-taxonomy register the project type and the sector, service and location filters; acf-create-fieldgroup adds client, year, credit, rights and the gallery in ACF's own export format, so the result is editable in ACF afterwards.
• bricks-create-template builds the archive and single-project templates; their conditions are a separate decision, made with bricks-set-template-conditions after you have looked at them.
• For each project: create-post as a draft, import-media-url for its images, edit-image to crop a copy for the card (the original stays untouched), set-featured-image, then acf-write-values for the fields. A gallery value replaces the whole field and needs an explicit replace wrapper, so it cannot be wiped by accident.
• Finally create-term and assign-terms tag the project so it appears under the right filters, and verify-rendered-page checks the served archive for images with no alt text.

Credits, rights and alt text are three different checks

They get muddled, so separate them. A credit says who made an image. Rights say whether you may show it here, for how long and in which markets. Alt text says what the image shows for someone who cannot see it. The agent can store all three, but only the last one is something it can produce itself, and even then only after it has looked at the picture with get-media-image.

If you need placeholder imagery while waiting on a photographer, search-images queries Openverse for openly licensed images and returns the licence, creator and a ready attribution string. That is fine for a mood board or a staging draft; it is not your work, so swap it out before the project is published. update-image-alt can then set alt text across a whole gallery in one call, with each image undoable on its own.

Timeline: why the twentieth project is faster than the first

The first sitting is the slow one: modelling, two templates and a single test project you review closely in Bricks and a browser at phone width. That review usually sends changes back to the template rather than the project, which is the point of doing one first. Once the shell is right, each further project is mostly reading your notes and writing fields, so batches go quicker and review shifts to the words and the image order.

Writing project copy is where time really goes, and an agent does not shorten the part that needs your memory of the job. Let it draft summaries from your notes, mark anything it inferred with [CONFIRM], and edit those yourself. A portfolio that reads as written by the studio is worth more than one that went live a week earlier.

Undoing a template or a batch of projects

Template writes and field writes are recorded in the ledger, but whether one comes back depends on the module. A Bricks template the run created, or its conditions, has a before-image, and so do ACF values written to a post, so rollback-change can usually reverse one bad project or archive card. Some writes are recorded as irreversible instead: editing an ACF field group, ACF values on terms, users or options pages, and a Divi Theme Builder template. Check each entry's rollback state in list-changes before relying on it.

If a whole evening's batch was built on the wrong field names, list-sessions shows that session's writes. Before undo-session, read its plan: it reverses supported changes newest first, refuses the run if you have hand-edited any of those projects since, stops at the first change that fails verification, and lists irreversible changes, which block the run unless you explicitly allow a partial undo.

Deleting the model is different. acf-delete-post-type refuses while projects exist unless forced, and even forced it leaves the project posts in the database under a type nothing registers any more. Export first and treat deletion as a decision you make in wp-admin, not one you hand to the agent.